With the advent of computing, user interfaces have been developed for allowing users to interact with electronic content and underlying software application functionality. In some cases, a given user may deploy numerous user interfaces associated with numerous content items in layers of deployed user interfaces. For example, a user may have two word processing documents, a spreadsheet document, a slide presentation application document, and an electronic mail interface deployed and displayed on his/her computer display screen simultaneously where each of the displayed documents or content items are layered on the display screen or are displayed adjacent to each other if sufficient display screen space is available or where one or more documents or content items are minimized out of view. In such situations, one of the displayed documents or content items may be an active item because it is currently receiving user action (e.g., editing, cursor focus, etc.) or because it is receiving some type of system action required for updating some aspect of the displayed item. Other displayed content items, for example, a displayed word processing document, may be inactive or idle meaning that no processing or updates are presently needed for that content item owing to an absence of user action or system action on the content item.
In a typical case, each displayed content item may be displayed as a collection of graphical display component presentations, for example, bitmaps, making up the displayed content item. For example, a displayed word processing document may include a collection of displayed bitmaps or other graphical presentations representing functionality buttons/controls (e.g., print buttons, save buttons, and the like), as well as, a collection of displayed bitmaps or other graphical representations representing document content (e.g., text, images, etc.). When such a document or individual graphical display components of the document is/are inactive or idle, continued processing associated with displaying the graphical presentations and continued storage of data for the graphical representations requires significant use of memory capacity, processing resources, and power, including battery life for mobile computing devices. Thus, the storage and processing of idle graphical presentations of electronic content items is costly in terms of memory capacity, processing resources, and power consumption.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.